January Update

Hello February, we are on to bigger and better things. Last month, I decided to concentrate on two things: walking and writing. I signed up for the JANO (write a novel of 50,000 words in a month) challenge and bought a pedometer to measure how many steps I took each day for a month.

It was a month of counting words and steps.

Here’s how it broke down:

I walked 109,442 steps which equals 44.9 miles in 21 days. (I didn’t get my pedometer until after the month had begun.) Twenty eight of those miles were intentional in the name of exercise. I know I can do better than that. I didn’t break the 10,000 steps (five mile) goal any day last month, so that’s my next milestone to achieve. I have a great gravel road nearby where I can walk exactly four miles up and down hills. It takes me a couple of hours so with the short daylight, it’s strictly a weekend event right now. I just have to make myself do it much more often.

I would have to walk our trail loop seven times to achieve that. I’m pretty sure I’d be dizzy by then.

As for the writing, well that was also close, but I didn’t quite meet my goal.

I knew I wouldn’t meet the 50,000 words towards a novel goal because I only need 18,000 or so to finish my novel. Mission accomplished on that front. My blog posts don’t actually count towards the official JANO count but they count toward the MEDLEY count so including this post, my total is 37,462 words. I am fairly certain that is the most I have ever written in a month. This post makes the 32 post in a row in my 365 day challenge. Also a record.

Are you going to get a lame post featuring a photo of my dog soon with only a caption? My Magic 8 Ball says “Outlook Good”. Remember that whole diamond and rock thing.

Still, overall it’s been a dang good month.

I am not going to pick two new goals for February. I like these two. I plan to just keep doing more of the same. Of course, the very definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I think that isn’t necessarily true if you are just trying to do better. We’ll see.